What I’ve Learned So Far

A few months ago I pointed to an interview with Dr. Edward Hallowell that talked about his long-term work diagnosing and treating Attention Deficit Disorder (ADD), and his parallel work on what he calls Attention Deficit Trait. ADT is the name Hallowell gives to the widespread condition he sees in many of today’s always-on, always-connected professionals, who exhibit many of the symptoms of ADD, but without having the inherited condition of ADD itself. He started using the term ADT after performing medical tests on many non-ADD people who came to his practice seeking treatment for adult-onset ADD. Hallowell should know whereof he speaks on these topics: as a psychiatrist, he’s treated patients with ADD for many years, plus he has ADD (as well as dyslexia) himself.

After my initial blog post, I ordered Hallowell’s best-known book, Delivered from Distraction: Getting the Most Out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder (which he co-authored with John Ratey), as well as his latest book, CrazyBusy: Overstretched, Overbooked, and About to Snap!: Strategies for Coping in a World Gone ADD. When they arrived, I skimmed the first book and read the second, but forgot to write up my thoughts on CrazyBusy here. (Or maybe I, uh, got distracted?)

In the first part of CrazyBusy, called “Overbooked and About to Snap,” Hallowell argues that “brain overload has reached the point where our entire society is suffering from culturally induced ADD.” While he doesn’t use the term ADT in Crazybusy, that’s what he’s talking about. In short, crisply written chapters (35 of them in a book of just 230 pages), Hallowell addresses the paradoxical challenges of modern life in the wealthy world: on the one hand, we have the chance to be better informed and better entertained than any population in human history, yet our surfeit of choices overwhelms us. Just as the overabundance of high-calorie foods in the United States enables more of us to get fat (and go on diets), the overabundance of news, entertainment, work, and leisure options enables more of us to get overwhelmed (and go on organizing binges). “Getting organized,” Hallowell points out, is for many people the current equivalent of “going on a diet.”

The remedy is to focus on what’s best or most important in your life, and insist on doing that ahead of—or instead of—less important things. As Hallowell puts it, “[B]eing deeply connected to what matters most is the enlightened way of life.” This insight here nothing new; it’s much like Peter Drucker’s apothegm, “First things first, second things not at all.” But Hallowell offers many helpful, culturally specific observations about how crazybusy-ness infects our lives, and about the specific neurological costs of this infection. What follows is a series of reflections inspired by some of Hallowell’s thoughts.

Hallowell discusses the burdens put on our frontal lobes by too many details and by persistent negative emotions. Your frontal lobes are a center of creativity, but if you weigh them down with an endless string of small tasks or with negative thoughts, you “[cost] them the sophistication and creativity they otherwise possess.” This matches my own experience: when I get in a negative rut or feel overwhelmed by the details of life — much less both — the hydrant of fresh ideas in my mind seems to lose all its pressure, and I can’t seem to come up with solutions to challenges that I know I ought to be able to solve. It also matches my observations of others: I know a few hard-bitten pessimists who remain in negative emotional states much of the time, and it’s clear from talking to them that they punch well below their mental weight when it comes to addressing the issues in their lives creatively.

Borrowing from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, Hallowell exhorts his readers to find the rhythm and space in their lives to operate in a “flow” state, when all the parts of the brain are working together in a timeless, creative condition of harmony. Hallowell knows that it is hardly a simple trick to find this state: “Many elements combine to lead you into the right rhythm, elements that busy life can batter and destroy if you let it. Positive emotional environment. Prioritizing. Planning how you use your time. Getting rid of people and products that drain you, while cultivating those that are replenishing. Doing what you do best. Practicing. Having time to practice.” The author encourages readers to establish “the higher ground of protected, uninterrupted time” in their lives, primarily by taking control of the things that they can. You will get more mental peace, he says, by “programming what you can program, predicting what you can predict, organizing what you can organize so that some of what you do will become automatic and you can find your rhythm, freeing your brain to use most of its neurons in the service of creative thinking.” Again, this is straightforward advice, but Hallowell inflects it with neurological expertise and conveys it with clear prose.

(A warning: Hallowell loves wordplay, even to a fault. He throws out neologisms like “gemmelsmerch” and “screensucking” and “gigaguilt” and “taildogging.” Some of the terms, like “screensucking,” make sense to me, but others seem work less well. Still, his pace is lively and his sentences are clear, and even the annoying neologisms are a small price to pay to get at Hallowell’s insights.)

Hallowell shares the advice of many of the online avatars of the “Getting Things Done” (GTD) movement, especially in his advice to de-cruft. “It is a good idea to get rid of as many leeches as you can rather than try to complete them (in the case of projects) or make them happy (in the case of people).” He makes a related observation that will be familiar to readers of Marcus Buckingham’s The One Thing You Need to Know: “Too often people waste years trying to get good at what they’re bad at instead of trying to do what they’re good at.” Hallowell’s advice: Let go of all the ancillary stuff, and focus on what you do best.

Similarly, we can let go of the “gigaguilt” — the overload of data and commitments — to which so many of us fall victim. Again, his advice is straightforward and sensible: “Set limits on what you commit to . . . have a system that can dictate for you what you will commit to and what you won’t. . . . In general, develop a system for dealing with all the demands on your time that come up regularly so you don’t have to decide on the spot each time.”

He also tackles the great, deadly, heroin-like temptation of the blogosphere: information addiction. “After a while, nothing goes on in the information addict’s life except what others have decided is going on in the world. In another of the many paradoxes of modern life, the info addict loses his or her ability to make a difference in life by trying so hard to keep up with all the differences other people are making.” This syndrome is related to pervasive forgetfulness (what he calls “fuhgeddomania”) that stems from our failure to set limits on the information we take in and keep track of, and a related failure to use meaningful structures to assign priorities to the information and the things in our lives.

In one particularly useful passage, Hallowell lists 26 reasons for why we keep so busy. I’ve found myself consulting this list again and again since I read the book, so here are a few excerpts, along with my reactions:

• “[Why are we busy?] We want to be. Nothing quite matches the excitement of checking e-mail every ten minutes or checking a stock price sixty-five times in a day.”
  Chris Barton left a comment on an earlier post here about wanting his dopamine rush now. This is all that we get when we check our e-mail or stock prices all the time. It’s not real value — just a piece of brain candy. The e-mail and stock-price examples make me think of the contrast between the working life of Warren Buffett and most other people. Although he uses a computer at home (for playing online bridge with Bill Gates, among other things), Buffett doesn’t have one in his office. He checks the prices of stocks he owns infrequently, and unlike most of us cubicle-monkeys, he gets his satisfaction not from the piece of banana he gets when he pushes the red button, but rather from the long-term wealth he builds through a process of patient, sober decision-making.
• “Being busy is a status symbol. Isn’t that strange?”
  Though my follow-through still leaves much to be desired, I’ve decided to give myself the better status symbol of serenity.
• “We are afraid that we will not keep up our standard of living unless we are superbusy.”
  The irony here is that most superbusy-ness concerns itself with trivial things that don’t increase our prosperity—things from the wrong side of the Pareto Principle. So in fact being superbusy actually prevents us from achieving our maximum performance and maximum wealth. The Buffett example above works in this context, too.
• “We can avoid everything that is difficult that we don’t want to do. Like following that dream we keep putting off.”
  Who? Me? No . . .
• “You don’t have to think too much. What a relief!”
  In my experience, many people — myself included — are scared of what they’ll find once they start thinking for themselves.
• “Being busy is better than not knowing what to do.”
  It often takes real confidence to say “I don’t know.” Not the usual “I dunno” that people use to deflect, but the deep-down, courageous “I don’t know” that motivates us to go and find out.
• “We overcommit. Do you know anyone who doesn’t?”
  When I read this book a few months ago, I drew a rectangle around the sentence “We overcommit” and wrote a note in the margin: “But not anymore for this bear!” The irony here still tastes bitter in my mouth, because just last week I had to bail out — bail out completely and with maximum embarrassment — from a project to which I overcommitted myself . . . about two months after I scribbled that comment in the book.

Many of Hallowell’s solutions are straightforward, and he doesn’t claim otherwise. How do you fight procrastination and distraction, for example? “You must train yourself to stay on task as much as the world is training you to go off task. Attention is like money: If we don’t watch how we spend it, we waste it.” But he says all of this to help his readers get to something better: “The greatest danger of being overwhelmed is not that you will fail to meet your goals, but that you will fail to think at your best and to give birth to your best ideas.” From reading this book as well as interviews with Hallowell, I think the good doctor really is someone who cares about helping others attain the best for themselves.

In the second part of CrazyBusy, “Creating a System that Works for You,” Hallowell turns to specifics of escaping from crazybusy-ness. In his chapter on “Accepting Limits,” he offers a basic but compelling insight, first by talking about how much attention people pay to their money: they read books and articles about it, seek expert advice on what to do with it, and so on. Then he writes:

“But time, a far more precious asset than money, rolls on unnoticed. We spend it. We waste it. We even kill it. Killing time. It’s worse that burning money. Sages through the ages have cautioned us to seize the day, to make the most of the moment, to live each day as if it were our last, but rare is the person who truly does that. Time is a finite resource, but we behave as if it were infinite because, at the deepest level, we deny the fact of death in our everyday lives.”

You can ready many a self-help book without confronting something that basic and honest.

Hallowell ties this fear of death to the ways that small fears (including the ones in the list discussed above) keep driving us toward crazybusy-ness: “Once fear starts to govern your use of time, you cease to be true to the best of who you are, and, paradoxically, you give up your chance to live a genuine life.”

As an antidote to this M.O., Hallowell provides a systematic time assessment tool that allows you to rate life activities based on how much they return to you, how easy they are, and how necessary (or how much the right thing) they are to do. You enter your own values into a grid, then use Hallowell’s formula to find the activities that are most necessary and return the most bang for your buck. The method may be a little artificial, but in fact it reflects the wisdom of many great people (Benjamin Franklin comes to mind) about spending your best time and effort on what will profit you most. To return to the example of Warren Buffett for a minute, I think of how he radically reduces the number of companies he might invest in by the very high, overlapping demands he puts on them. As I discussed last week, for Buffett to invest in a company, it must be virtually certain to earn more and be worth more in five, ten, and 20 years. He prefers companies that hold enough hard assets that, even if the business were liquidated, he could recover his initial investment from the liquidation sale. He requires stable, high-quality management and a clean balance sheet. And he insists that they be valued at a bargain compared to the market. Not many companies meet all of these qualification, but the ones that do, Buffett buys into in a big way.

Our lives should be the same. Now, Hallowell’s metric isn’t the perfect instrument, especially since every line of it is based on your own subjective estimates rather than hard financial figures. But it’s a start for getting us to think about the Pareto-effective actions in our lives that lead to the greatest returns, the greatest satisfaction, the greatest success.

CrazyBusy isn’t consistently groundbreaking, and it’s not the sole compendium of wisdom you need to get your life in order. But, wow, does it ever help. Hallowell seems like a mensch who has, despite his imperfections, figured out a lot about his own life, and whose professional experience has given him a lot of insight into the imperfections that afflict us all.

I’ll leave you with this great kernel of wisdom from the book. If each of us took it seriously day by day, crazybusy-ness might become a thing of the past. Here it is:

“Don’t die without having tried to do what you most want to do.”

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 15th, 2007 at 5:11 pm and is filed under Living richly.